What's Wrong With Being Right?

(Othello's Tragic Flaw Was Confirmation Bias)

Being right is not the same thing as being persuasive. It’s also not the same thing as being inspiring, compelling, fit, or adaptive. The skills needed to survive (and thrive) may differ from—and even conflict with—those needed to be right.

In a dynamic world—where our perceptions are both a part of and a contributing force to reality—being right is old school. More important than being right is being able to change reality to fit one’s models (the triumph of Baconian science and the lab over Aristotelian science and natural observation).

Yet making reality in one’s own image is also dangerous, because it leads to confirmation bias.

Peter Szondi writes, “Othello’s doubts can be put to rest only by the evidence that proves him right, not by the evidence that proves him a liar. And this is his only wish.”

Had Othello been right that his wife were an adulterer—his doubts would have been justified. The horror of his example is that he cared more about justifying his doubts than anything else. He also turned out to be wrong, but that’s almost incidental.

Being right has to count for something, and a world in which there is no correctness, no scientific method, no communities of standardized knowledge, would be a worse one. The question is: how much does it count for and how do you weight other values against it?